CONCEPT
How Would I Know If I Was Wrong?
The methodological discipline Laudan makes unavoidable: the demand to specify in advance what evidence would change your mind, and then to be honest when such evidence arrives — the single practice that distinguishes rational evaluation from ideological conviction.
The phrase comes from Segal's foreword, where it names the question he could not answer about his own position in the AI discourse. He believed the amplifier thesis. He still does. But he could not say what evidence would convince him he was wrong. The question is Laudanian in the deepest sense: without it, evaluation collapses into conviction, and conviction — however well-founded at the moment of its adoption — has no mechanism for self-correction. The question must be asked of every position, at every moment, by every evaluator. It is the discipline that keeps inquiry rational even when the evidence is incomplete and the stakes are high.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Laudan treated the question as the operational test of intellectual seriousness. A position that cannot specify what would disconfirm it is not a rational commitment; it is a belief